Grey's Anatomy fans have had to watch a lot of their favorite characters die. However,
on fictional TV, the bright side of goodbye is that not even death is final. Let's take a look
at all of the Grey's Anatomy cast members who have returned to Grey-Sloan Memorial Hospital.
T.R. Knight's character, George O'Malley, dies a hero,
stepping in front of a bus to save a stranger in the Season 5 finale.
His thoughts as an actor leaving the series, however, weren't so epic.
Knight told Entertainment Weekly that he left the show because of creative differences, saying,
"My five-year experience proved to me that I could
not trust any answer that was given [about George]."
Knight put those differences aside so that George could reunite with Meredith Grey on a beach
while she's in a COVID-induced unconscious state in Season 17.
After conversations with showrunner Krista Vernoff,
Knight said he was also inspired to return to Grey's Anatomy by his husband. He told Deadline:
"We were talking about that idea of closure and he was saying that
sometimes closure's shutting a door, and sometimes it's revisiting a familiar room,
and finding what brought you joy. And it just hit me."
Knight's return episode is titled "You'll Never Walk Alone". He said
that spending the day shooting on the beach with his ex-colleagues was, quote,
"just unlike any other experience I've ever had in my entire life, in my 47 years."
Patrick Dempsey left Grey's Anatomy after playing Meredith Grey's husband,
Dr. Derek Shepherd, for 11 seasons. Like George O'Malley, Dr. Shepherd exits a hero
after he dies from complications after a car accident where he saved a mother and daughter.
And like T.R. Knight, the real reason behind Dempsey's departure was reportedly not as valiant.
Before the news officially broke,
Page Six reported Dempsey was allegedly a "diva" on set. A source said:
"[Shonda Rhimes] suspended him for a while,
and the word on set is that he isn't coming back full time."
Dempsey confessed to Entertainment Weekly that his work hours were impacting his family life:
"You never know your schedule, so your kid asks you, 'What are you doing on Monday?' and you go,
'I don't know,' because I don't know my schedule. Doing that for 11 years is challenging."
Like O'Malley, Derek also returned as part of Meredith's COVID-induced
dreams. Krista Vernoff has been Grey's Anatomy's showrunner since Season 14,
and told Deadline that the idea to bring characters back in Season 17 is about
bringing "joy" to fans. Dempsey agreed with this sentiment, and agreed to come back. He said:
"I think the whole atmosphere has changed, certainly working at the beach, and seeing
everybody again was really a very healing process, and really rewarding, and a lot of fun."
Jeffrey Dean Morgan first appeared on Grey's Anatomy when he played a
patient named Denny Duquette, who falls in love with his doctor, Izzie Stevens.
Denny has a bad heart, and even though Izzie takes extreme and
morally questionable steps to try and save his life — he dies in the Season 2 finale.
Morgan told the Los Angeles Times in 2006 that he "pleaded" with showrunner Shonda Rhimes:
"Please, please, just let me live."
Unfortunately, none of his begging worked. He
continued about the day he shot Denny's death scene:
"A dark, grim day. I'm still not over it. It broke my heart to leave that show."
He did, however, credit Shonda Rhimes and Grey's Anatomy with giving him the
notoriety as an actor to choose, quote, "the kind of projects [he wants] to do."
Ghosts visit the living easily enough on TV, so Morgan and Denny have reappeared on our screens
several times over the years. In Season 3, Denny is one of a few patients who visit
Meredith's unconscious thoughts while she fights to survive after drowning.
"You're damn right you are."
Denny's ghost also appears in several episodes in Season 5 to try and warn his former fiancée Izzie
that she has cancer. This is when we learned that ghost love only works well on supernatural shows.
When Grey's Anatomy fans tuned into the April 1st, 2021 episode, "Breathe,"
not only were they graced with the appearance of Chyler Leigh's character Lexie Grey — who
dies in a plane crash in the Season 8 finale — but also Eric Dane's character Dr. Mark Sloan,
the love of Lexie's life. Dane previously left the show in Season 9; while Mark initially
survived the plane crash during the Season 8 finale, he later died of complications.
Dane told The Hollywood Reporter that he was in China filming a movie when he got the first call
from showrunner Krista Vernoff about returning. The story made sense, so Dane signed up. He said:
"It feels like I never left. It's a role that always fit for me,
like one of those great old t-shirts. And it was just like putting the t-shirt back on
and hanging out on a beach for a couple days, and catching up with some old friends."
Being that Chyler Leigh films Supergirl in Canada, she unfortunately couldn't physically
reunite with Dane and Ellen Pompeo for the much-anticipated beach scene.
But Grey's Anatomy used, quote, "green screen magic" to make it all happen.
As for their characters, Dane believes they're meant to be together in any dimension, saying:
"I think Mark would have found Lexie no matter what. Whether it would have been on
Meredith's beach or Lexie's beach, or anybody's beach, I think Mark would have found her."
Sarah Drew's character April Kepner first joins the staff of Seattle Grace Hospital
when it merges with the fictional Mercy West hospital in Season 6. April quickly became a
beloved fan favorite, especially after she elopes with fellow Mercy West transplant Jackson Avery.
The couple goes through many hardships together, and despite their popularity,
they never find their way back to each other after a divorce.
In March 2018, Deadline reported that Drew was exiting Grey's Anatomy for creative reasons.
Drew expressed her sadness about leaving to fans on Instagram:
"Thank you for all of the love. I know you're sad. I'm sad too."
Luckily for fans, Drew is gearing up for a return, Deadline reported in March 2021.
We're unsure about the nature of her return, but April doesn't die in her final episode,
so she probably won't be in Meredith's beachy, limbo-state dreams. However, Drew and Williams
have filmed scenes together. They're all smiles in a video filmed on set, which they posted to
their individual Instagram accounts. The air date of Drew's return is set for May 6th, 2021.
Grey's Anatomy has seen the return of many former cast members as guest stars over the years.
So far, the only person to return to her role as a series regular is Kim Raver,
who joined the cast in Season 6 as cardiothoracic surgeon Dr. Teddy Altman.
"Teddy and I, we served in Iraq together, and she's going to be joining us for a little while,
okay? Come on, I'll introduce you to the chief."
She gets involved in a love triangle with Dr. Owen Hunt, whom she served with in the army,
and her mentee, Dr. Cristina Yang. Teddy moves on to a new job after the Season 8 finale,
needing a new start after her husband Henry dies. Plus, she's likely sick of pining over Owen.
In Season 14 of the show, Owen visits Teddy in Germany. By the season finale, she tells
him she's pregnant with his daughter. Deadline reported that it was announced Raver would return
as a series regular ahead of Season 15, of which she said she was, quote, "thrilled". She said:
"I have a special place in my heart for Teddy and feel very lucky to
have the opportunity to continue her story."
Isaiah Washington had one of the most contentious Grey's Anatomy exit stories,
making his return that much more shocking. To refresh your memory,
Washington, who played Dr. Cristina Yang's love interest, Dr. Preston Burke,
was fired from the show after the Season 3 finale for using a homophobic slur in reference
to co-star T.R. Knight, The New York Times reported. Washington told Entertainment Weekly:
"I'm saddened by the outcome. I did everything that the producers and the
network asked me to do [to apologize]. I came back under great duress and stress,
and thought I was doing the job I was hired to do."
Seven years later, Washington reprised the role of Preston to entice Cristina to take
a job in Switzerland, as part of the writers' way of accommodating Sandra Oh's decision to
leave Grey's Anatomy in Season 10. Because of the controversy surrounding his firing, Shonda
Rhimes released a statement about his return. According to The Hollywood Reporter, she said:
"It's important to me that Cristina's journey unfolds exactly as it should.
Burke is vital to that journey — he gives her story that full-circle moment we need
to properly say goodbye to our beloved Cristina Yang."
It's hard to imagine a time when Caterina Scorsone didn't roam the halls of Grey-Sloan
Memorial Hospital as renowned neurosurgeon Amelia Shepherd, younger sister of Dr. Derek Shepherd.
However, you may remember how her character at first only appeared in a single Season 7 episode
before returning to California. Scorsone's character was reintroduced in Season 10,
and she joined the cast as a regular in Season 11.
Amelia has been through a lot in Seattle, putting aside that she's a recovering drug addict
who had already lost a baby and a fiancé when she arrived in Washington. Amelia is
now a mother to her son Scout with her boyfriend Link. She told The Hollywood Reporter in 2019:
"We've seen Amelia be unbelievably resilient. She must be made of some
sort of rubber because she seems to bounce!"
Sometimes, the patients at Grey-Sloan Memorial Hospital are as memorable as
our favorite doctors — although it's usually because they've died in some catastrophic
tragedy. But that's not exactly what happened to Mandy Moore's character, Mary Portman,
when Moore appeared on the medical drama years before she captured our hearts on This Is Us.
Moore first appeared on the iconic Season 6 episodes "Sanctuary" and "Death And All
His Friends." Mary is at Seattle Grace to get a colostomy bag reversal courtesy
of Dr. Miranda Bailey, but the procedure never happens because of a shooting in the hospital.
Moore returns in the Season 7 episode "These Arms of Mine". This time, the hospital is filming
a documentary and Dr. Bailey is finally going to perform the procedure on Mary. Tragically,
there are complications and Mary is braindead for much of the episode before she dies.
Moore is credited in a later Season 7 episode "That's Me Trying,"
playing a corpse as a heartbroken Miranda tries to uncover Mary's cause of death.
On the pilot episode of Grey's Anatomy, Meredith Grey gets to partake in Katie Bryce's surgery with
Dr. Derek Shepherd because she correctly diagnoses an aneurysm that was difficult to find. Katie,
played by Skyler Shaye, returns eleven seasons later to have Dr. Amelia Shepherd operate on
another aneurysm in the episode "My Next Life." But that wasn't the last we'd see of Katie Bryce.
She appears in front of the medical board on behalf of Meredith in the
Season 16 episode "My Shot," when the doctor's medical license is in jeopardy.
Upon her first return, Shaye spoke with Cosmopolitan about
the memories she had from filming the pilot:
"I remember my last day of filming, Katie — Katherine [Heigl] — gave me a card,
I still have it, saying how wonderful it was to work with me and she hopes to see me soon."
Shaye shared that she had an emotional moment with a cast member upon her first return to set.
"As soon as I got in the bed and had the gown on,
I look at Chandra Wilson, she directed this episode [and plays Dr. Miranda Bailey],
and I started crying. And she started crying — we both had this emotional moment together."
Kyle Chandler is more than our favorite football coach on Friday Night Lights. He also played Dylan
Young — aka "the bomb squad guy" — in Season 2 episodes "It's The End Of The World" and "As We
Know It." It's Dylan's job to safely dispose of an active bomb that's in a man's chest cavity after
safely instructing Meredith Grey on how to remove her hand from inside of it. Meredith survives, but
unfortunately Young dies when the bomb explodes in his hand as he's about to dispose of it.
Showrunner Shonda Rhimes told Entertainment Weekly in 2017 that she regrets her creative choice:
"[Dylan] was written to explode. But I did not
expect to have Kyle Chandler. I didn't want to explode him."
But as we've seen already, it's easy to bring the dead back to live on TV.
Rhimes had Chandler come back for two episodes in Season 3 as a ghost that
visits Meredith's thoughts when she's fighting for her life after drowning.
Old-school Grey's Anatomy fans remember that a lot happened in Season 2. Before the bomb in
the chest cavity there was the train crash in the Season 2 episode "Into You Like A Train."
Years after playing Abby, the girl everyone loved to hate on Dawson's Creek, Monica Keena
plays Bonnie, who has a fiancé named Danny and her whole life ahead of her when a train crashes and
she's suddenly, fatefully connected to a fellow passenger named Tom after a pole impales them.
Even Tom asks the doctors to save Bonnie, who is younger than him — but that's not how medicine
works. Once the two are separated, doctors are unable to save Bonnie — though Meredith Grey
gives it her best shot. Keena returns along with many of Meredith's patients when she's
fighting for her life after a drowning incident in the Season 3 episode "Some Kind of Miracle."
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